


Same Old Burnt Sugar

by Brosedshield



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Angst, Codependency, Diabetes, Drinking, Eating Disorders, Gen, Germany, Harm to Children, Hunting, Minor Character Death, Protective Siblings, Self-Hatred, Siblings, Sugar Sickness, Witches, offscreen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 12:17:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brosedshield/pseuds/Brosedshield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Hansel can’t stand the smell (taste, thought) of sugar and Gretel holds him up (or maybe they support each other)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Old Burnt Sugar

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by Lavinia and whereupon, two fantastic people who made this story much better even coming to the fandom cold.

The village of Schwinburg had a witch and a sweetshop.  
  
Hansel and Gretel had heard of the witch just as they were finishing a job in the village of Oberpatch, half a day away. That hunt had yielded a pittance of their usual price, but the witch had been a great mostly-spider thing a bit too fast and poisonous for someone without their particular talents to take down. Neither of them could truly walk away. The villagers had paid upfront and in-full, at least, even if none of the children taken had been alive by the time the brother and sister had tracked the monster to her lair.  
  
The Schwinburg sweetshop, on the other hand, was just within the city gates. The smell hit Hansel hard, the thick richness of butter, the sharp tang of ginger, the burnt sweetness of sugar wafting in the air and making his stomach clench. Between that and the way Schwinburg’s gates towered above their heads like a cage, the jagged spikes on the top carved to mimic (or mock) the monsters from a half-dozen bestiaries, he could feel the old screaming, the shadow edge of dizziness and fear rising up along his spine.  
  
Only Gretel’s grip on his shoulder, a pressure he could feel even through the jacket and armor and into the bruising their last hunt had left, held him in place, held him to _this_ job and _this_ time.  
  
Still, he dropped his eyes as they passed, and if he kept maybe a too-tight grip on his gun, only the strain in his hands gave any sign.  
  
Schwinburg was full of the usual assholes, men who thought that a batch of poor children disappearing into the woods was cause for distributing poison meat for the wolves—or, in their own words, “save a sovereign, dip the brats in flea-poison before they wander off”—and a woman dressed in leathers like a man was mockery at best, a whore a worst, and not worth respecting.  
  
“Say that in front of us again, and I’ll shoot out your manhood, Your Honor,” Gretel said, steel and fire and the only sweet that Hansel could taste without gagging. She rolled the blunderbuss from her shoulder and aimed it easily with one hand at the guards who had advanced to defend their employer. “Come closer and I’ll drop you like a rotten oak.”  
  
Her voice was strong and clear and echoed through the town square like a bell. _Frauen_ in windows gasped, and children hid behind their elders, and probably even the monsters in their dens knew now that there was a new force in Schwinburg: one that had never met a monster (petty human or viciously supernatural, there was no difference) of which she was afraid.  
  
Hansel could speak just fine, could make himself heard and strut and bluster with the best of them, but he preferred not to be seen, to let his three-hours-older sister stand in the twilight and be heard to the ends of the earth.  
  
She had the words and the will and the way, and still the fools of Schwinburg strutting forward with no idea of what they faced only stopped when Hansel pointed his blunderbuss at their heads. “You heard her. Back down.”  
  
The men held up their hands, mock-startled and stupid, and Gretel did the talking. She told them why the Kuhns, Hansel and Gretel, were there and what it would cost them. She told them how much gold she and he expected in advance, and what they wanted if they could bring the children back alive. Hansel nodded at all the right times, kept his gun trained on the fools and wished he could get the stink of sweet buns out of his nose.  
  
It was more than habit to agree with his sister. It was ritual. It was protection. When eyes were on them, they never disagreed. They rarely argued anyway—the mare she’d bought in Berlin with the majority of his archery winnings, and the whore he’d spent the week with in Krakow were two notable exceptions—but never when Gretel was in the delicate business of convincing another set of morons that when she and Hansel went to a fight, it would be _she and Hansel_.  
  
Maybe it was because she was his sister, but Hansel couldn’t understand why the village idiots that held the purse strings insisted on looking at Gretel and seeing a whore in leathers pretending she could use a blade. For one, Hansel had seen (met, known, in all senses of the word) plenty of whores and not one had the balls to dress like his sister (even that one that had, indeed, had balls).  
  
For another, she had a vicious right hook, and of the two of them, she had the stronger stomach. And he didn’t just mean his _stomach_.  
  
She looked good in blood, his sister. She would bite and kick and fight and go toe to toe with any witch, bastard, or monster they faced without a second’s hesitation. She didn’t worry for her clothes, face, skin, hands, hide, bones, or the blades and clubs that could break them. She had never once been trapped in what was expected of her.  
  
And Hansel, at least in his own heart, had never once lived up to what was expected of him.  
  
The bargaining done, the arguments finished, the night close to falling, they retreated to the local cheap inn, accosted by the usual wide-eyed townies, come to praise or poke at the famous siblings with a mixture of awe and fear that made Hansel almost as sick as sugar.  
  
The beer was sweet on his tongue, every drought threatening to have his stomach revolt, but he downed them grimly and let Gretel carry the conversation (as she carried him), let her give the spiel: bring down, behead, and burn.  
  
He waved away the stew when it came, and accepted the next tankard shoved into his hand, accepted Gretel’s knowing look as she ate his helping as well as hers—she’d long ago stopped forcing him to eat, stopped pinning him down and snarling at him to keep himself alive, knowing now that he would, for her—and held it together until he’d filled his stomach with enough bitter beer to have a good excuse.  
  
The late summer night was crisp around the edges, with stars that burned like a witch’s eye on a pyre, and he bent over the midden pile, knees digging into the dirt of a hundred un-finished meals and emptied his stomach until he could imagine he tasted blood and ginger in the bile sliding down his throat.  
  
When he finished, panting from the pain, lightning in his head and his watch buzzing like a bee’s nest, he leaned against the filthy wall and forced himself to breathe. After better than a decade, he didn’t have to think about getting out the syringe, shoving the needle into his thigh. The world spun in a way that was not completely related to alcohol, and he barely felt the needle’s tiny, sharp pain.  
  
Gretel found him like that later, her hair slightly mussed, a rip in her shirt, new scrapes on her knuckles.  
  
Hansel blinked up at her. “Trouble?”  
  
She shook her head. “Guy got drunk, got handsy.”  
  
“So you got handsy?” He grabbed her by the hand and ran a thumb over her bruised knuckles. The world was still spinning. He could imagine sugar on his tongue, bruises yellowing on her skin like butter browning over the fire.  
  
Gretel’s mouth quirked and she dropped down next to him. “Handsy, Hansel. You could say that. Or maybe say he’s sleeping it off after I introduced his jaw to my fist. How about you, Hans? Trouble?”  
  
He looked away. “Same old, same old, sis.”  
  
She gently disentangled her hand and laid it over his thigh where the cloth of his pants was worn thin from the needle riding through. “Same old?”  
  
He put his hand over hers, held onto her warmth and her steady fierce strength. “Can’t burn this one, can we?”  
  
She moved her head, though through the darkness he couldn’t tell whether the short motion was a nod, a shake, or something indefinable. “Let’s get you to bed, shall we?”  
  
He didn’t fight her as she pulled him back to his feet and back into motion.  
  
The next day they rode into the forests near Schwinburg and killed themselves a witch.  
  
This one wasn’t very smart, or fast, and didn’t last too long, even if she fought hard before dying. Hansel ended up pulling one of her jagged spines out of his hand—sharp like a hedgehog’s, but something that once they got stuck wouldn’t come easily from his flesh, and _burned_ —and Gretel ended with blood a solid stain from her waist to her calves, with one streak over her forehead where she had wiped sweat from her brow during the work.  
  
The witch had been luring the children into her snares with birdsong, and then keeping them in cages. Only two of the eight that had been taken were still alive.  
  
They were poor little mites, sharp bones and big terrified eyes as Hansel smashed their cage doors and Gretel told them in her clean and no-nonsense voice that they were okay, that they would be okay. Hansel had to turn away from the sight of the blank eyes, of bony arms wrapped around his sister’s neck, and wrap his hand that bled sluggishly. This witch hadn’t fed her prey, apparently preferring them mostly bone.  
  
When Gretel had broken them out, when they had burned their first witch down to ashes and filth, he had been a fat little boy, slow and empty-eyed from the sugar and the fear. He still woke thrashing from nightmares about those cookies and shards of sugar shoved through the bars of his cage, his hands shaking while he brought it to his lips, unable to do anything less while the witch held a knife to his sister’s throat. He had known even then, that he would be eaten when he had eaten enough to please her, but he could do nothing less for his sister’s life. To this day, the act of eating reminded him of having so much sugar in his stomach that he had to vomit it out, and then watching helplessly while the witch beat his sister bloody for his sins.  
  
They burned the witch’s lair to the ground, and carried away their reward, the little girl clinging to Gretel’s shoulders, the undernourished boy with empty eyes Hansel recognized well carried in his arms.  
  
It seemed a long, slow road back to Schwinburg, a smell almost like burnt sugar lingering in his nose, as always, following his sister wherever she would go.

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone know 1) if Kuhn is actually their last name in the movie or 2) if it was ever specified who was older? The internet is inconclusive, and my memory is not that good.
> 
> This is also posted [at LJ](http://brosedshield.livejournal.com/58862.html) with more notes. I can also post them here if anyone is interested, just let me know :).


End file.
